Some Thoughts on the Future of Education

I was thinking earlier about how drastically education could change as the result of technology.

Here are some random thoughts along that vector:

Everything becomes about local learning pods. So it’s any small room with displays, cameras, and a place for people to gather.

The content is pre-made and is best of the best, crowd-rated from around the world.

The content is also aggressively customized to the audience—whether that’s one person or 20.

The format is highly question and story based. You start with a series of interesting questions, which get the students thinking and debating with each other, and then you move into some highly engaging content on the topic. Think “Hardcore History” by Dan Carlin, or shorter versions of that kind of thing.

So, one of the issues with just having thousands of videos out there—regardless of the quality of the content—is that you still need a steward to some degree, in most cases. What technology allows you to do is have the best teachers in the world come on live and manage virtual classrooms spanning thousands or millions of learning pods. So it’s the best teachers + the best content, at scale.

Naturally, at this point it’ll be considered the worst kind of offense ever for an esteemed professor to do a lecture on something important for a small, select group of people. It’ll be considered the epitome of elitism and snobbery to not make it available to billions in realtime.